


Stain Removal

by Eschat0n



Category: Brigador (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-22 16:11:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22186225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eschat0n/pseuds/Eschat0n
Summary: Buying from Spacers is costly, but revenge on old men is harder still.
Kudos: 1





	Stain Removal

By midnight Javier was the former Marshal of Procurement, just as he had been the former Manager of Procurement so many decades ago. The lights were off in his highrise flat, because before the scotch it had seemed important to him to witness the flashes of light rising over the walls which separated Central from the rest of Solo Nobre. To remind himself how far he had come, even if it seemed like nothing had changed at all.

The whiskey soured that mood. Instead he found himself sullenly watching a holovid; one of the recent ones, from offworld. Smuggled in with the Spacer's guns, as a present to him. Great Leader knew that for his Marshal, it wasn't about the liquor or the money, or even the whore clones the Spacers dumped on them like garbage at Souto. So he got him what he really wanted but could never have - transportation back to the Inner Worlds, where he'd come from.

  
Javier swallowed the ice rock at the bottom of his scotch, felt it burn like Ganymede on its way down. Where had he picked up that habit? The vids weren't memorable, either. They pulsated; too much color, too much movement. Or was that always what youth was, to old men? But over time, as Javier had forgotten his childhood - truly, his soul - he had come to enjoy this alienation from his roots in and of itself. Perverse, perhaps, but he sensed that this perversity came to all old men in one way or another. This novel culture; this video of perfect people dancing across pastel countrysides to remixes of the folk music of his youth - it was too much. It transported him out of Solo Nobre, out of the present moment. It gave the present a transcendental quality. More than anything, he had grown to enjoy this dissociation, this detachment from the present. As an artifact, you could watch reality unfold at a distance, yourself already mostly a part of where it had been. That the insanity now mapped onto the insanity of youth was a comfort to Javier where younger people might find it maddening. It was an absolution.

Dissociation was not altogether strange to Javier. He had need of it when Great Leader had risen to prominence – to sell himself as the newly loyal traitor, willing to put his lifelong alliance to the zaibatsu aside in return for a stay of execution. Then, going to work for the new Man. Firing up old contacts with the Voccs, Chatfields, Dunsmuirs. Long nights looking at what little Novo Solo might offer up to the Heavens in return for MLRS launchers – boys, girls, minerals. And now that too was dead.

Abruptly, the holovid died. Javier’s flat was dark, its massive windows the only source of dim illumination; the far-off reddish-orange of sodium-neon highway lights in the Belt; the explosions and reports of the guns beyond that. Faintly, Javier hoped his staff would make it to Souto and the orbital tug there. As for himself, he needed to tend to history.

  
“Marshal Javier” a modulated voice pulsed in the dark of the room. He hadn’t heard them come in, but he knew everything about it. Who they were. What they wanted. Why they wanted it. Why, for that matter, they had not simply shot him yet. And this was good, because he wanted to buy one more thing, for one more awful price, before this was over.

“Welcome down,” he said – as he always had to Spacers. He turned in his high-backed office chair slowly. “Since you’re here, I’d ask for the latest bill of lading, but as I can see certain wavelengths of light are more in evidence in our fine city tonight, I think it is safe to say delivery has been assured. I’d pay you now, except I think you’ve… cut off the source of my funds.”

  
Javier squinted, but there was no one there. He couldn’t hear the hum of active camouflage either. This surprised a part of his brain somewhere; had they fixed that problem since he’d known of it?

The voice spoke again: “we require only your death, now.”

Javier’s face contorted – it could have been a grimace, but it was a Nobrean smile. Whatever affinity his heart might have lacked for this place, his body and his mannerisms were more fully aligned with it.

“Don’t fucking lie to me, shit-of-a-comet. Bruja espaço.”

Let them think they were going to get it, then twist it, just for fun.

“I’m ninety-five years old. What you want, I can’t give you. I don’t have the energy. No pleasure in working over a horse someone else already worked over long before you ever got here.”

The voice did not reply. Sometimes they’d wait; he knew that. They had all these little games they liked to play with the dirtborn; fancied themselves boogiemen. It was tiring; he’d have to do something; act like it was getting to him. Otherwise they’d be at this all night. He knew they knew he knew too much. Had all the wrong contacts and nothing to offer anyone except risk.

“Poke the Saints in their limey mouths, I can’t believe how dense you are, for shit that floats,” he intoned. Were those his last words? Paused. No. Too bad. “I’m here. I didn’t run. I have nothing and I want nothing, and because of that you’re getting nothing."

Silence.

“While you’re here, have a drink. Or don’t you jellybabies drink anymore?”

Javier reached for the scotch. His arm never got to the glass. It was melting, transfixed in an invisible ray of gamma radiation emanating from a pinprick of violet light behind his kitchen counter. Javier knew he couldn’t dissociate himself from the pain of this, but his whole life had been pain. Death was easy. The price of this purchase was cheap, and his burden light. The shag carpet beneath his chair absorbed the body as he liquified.


End file.
